Grooveshark is officially dead, but a rogue fan backed up 90% of the music and relaunched a new version of the streaming website

After years of legal battles with the music industry, Grooveshark
officially shut down for good on April 30th — that is until a
rogue fan relaunched the music streaming website under a new
domain.

Grooveshark, originally founded in 2006, quickly became popular
among music fans because of its on-demand catalogue that allowed
you to stream songs a la carte long before Spotify arrived on the
scene. While popular, many of the songs uploaded to Grooveshark
were copyrighted songs — with even
Grooveshark's founders reportedly instructing employees to upload
popular songs — all of which eventually led to the official
website's shutdown.

Less than a week later after Grooveshark went dark, a new
version of Grooveshark has popped up, and it's the handiwork of a rogue fan
who goes by "Shark," who claims he managed to back up 90% of the
songs before the official website's shutdown, according
to BGR.

"I started backing up all the content on the website when I
started suspecting that Grooveshark’s demise is close and my
suspicion was confirmed a few days later when they closed," Shark
wrote to BGR in an email. "By the time they closed I have already
backed up 90% of the content on the site and I’m now working on
getting the remaining 10%."

To protect itself from being yanked down again, the new
Grooveshark website includes a legal disclaimer, informing users
that "the songs you want to download may have copyright(s)
on them" and that "you're not allowed to download the song
if you don't possess the original record."

Of course, even with obvious links to file DMCA take-down
requests and its legal disclaimers plastered all over the site,
there's no telling how long the new Grooveshark will manage to
keep the lights on — so don't cancel that Spotify Premium
membership quite yet.